Last Friday, I had the opportunity to lead a hands-on AWS workshop at the AWS User Group Nepal Meetup, hosted at Banepa College of Management & Technology in Kavrepalanchok. The session, "From Code to Cloud: Build, Deploy & Showcase with AWS," was designed for beginners — students and early developers who understood how to write code but had never deployed anything to a live server. My goal was to take them on a full journey: from understanding how a website works at a fundamental level, all the way to deploying a real, working site on AWS.
Starting With the Fundamentals
Before touching the AWS Console, we broke down how a website actually works — the DNS lookup, the request traveling across the internet, and the server responding with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I find that skipping this step is where most beginner cloud content goes wrong; you can't appreciate what AWS automates for you until you've seen the manual version.
From there, we compared traditional hosting models — shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers — against cloud computing, covering the core challenges of owning physical infrastructure: fixed capacity, hardware maintenance, downtime, and high upfront costs. This set up the "why" before the "how."
Cloud Service Models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
Using real-world analogies (renting an empty house vs. eating at a restaurant vs. using Netflix), I walked through the three service models and mapped each to concrete AWS examples:
● IaaS — Amazon EC2 (raw compute, storage, and networking)
● PaaS — AWS Elastic Beanstalk (managed application platform)
● SaaS — fully managed end-user software
Core AWS Services Covered
The heart of the workshop was a tour of AWS's building blocks — with 200+ services in the AWS ecosystem spanning compute, storage, networking, databases, AI, analytics, security, and developer tools. We focused on the services most relevant to a first deployment:
● Amazon EC2 — virtual servers for compute
● Amazon S3 — object storage, and static website hosting
● AWS IAM — identity and access management
● Amazon VPC — private virtual networking
● Amazon RDS — managed relational databases
● Amazon DynamoDB — managed NoSQL database
● AWS Lambda — serverless compute functions
● Amazon CloudFront — content delivery network (CDN)
● Amazon Route 53 — DNS and domain routing
● Amazon CloudWatch — monitoring and metrics
● AWS CloudTrail — API activity auditing and logs
Hands-On: Deploying a Static Site on Amazon S3
We got hands-on early with the simplest, most cost-effective deployment path — static website hosting on S3. Step by step, attendees:
● Created an S3 bucket
● Uploaded HTML, CSS, JS, and image files
● Enabled Static Website Hosting on the bucket
● Configured a bucket policy for public read access
● Accessed their live site via the generated S3 website endpoint
We then contrasted this with hosting a dynamic site on EC2 — launching an instance, configuring security groups, connecting via SSH, installing a web server (Apache/Nginx), and serving files from the instance's public IP — to make the trade-offs between S3 and EC2 concrete rather than theoretical.
Planning for Cost and Good Architecture
No AWS workshop is complete without talking about cost. We used the AWS Pricing Calculator to show how to estimate infrastructure costs before deploying anything, and closed the session with the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability — the same principles that guide real production architecture decisions.
Why This Matters to Me
As an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, sessions like this are exactly why I'm passionate about community-driven cloud education. Watching beginners go from "I don't understand what a server is" to "I just deployed my own site on S3" in a single afternoon is the kind of tangible impact that keeps me investing in the AWS community in Nepal.
Huge thanks to AWS User Group Nepal and Banepa College of Management & Technology for organizing this, and to our supporters — Genèse, IMS Software, and Women in Big Data Nepal — for making it possible. Looking forward to more sessions like this.
📅 From Code to Cloud: Build, Deploy & Showcase with AWS
📍 Banepa College of Management & Technology, Kavrepalanchok
🗓️ Friday, 7th August 2026
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